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Running VMWare ESXi 6.5 under Linux/KVM!

So with VIRL in hand, the next thing I wanted to do was play with some LACP, and VMWare ESX. Of course the best way to do this is under KVM as you can use UDP to bounce packets around between virtual machines, like the VIRL L2 switch. I went ahead and fired up 5.5 and got this nice purple screen of death.

Purple screen of death!

So naturally I need to force the processor type. Also after reading a few sites, I needed to turn on a nested & ignore_msrs settings:

root@ubuntu:/etc/modprobe.d# cat qemu-system-x86.conf

options kvm_amd nested=1
options kvm ignore_msrs=1

Naturally if you are using an Intel processor the statements need to reflect that. All being well you will see something like this in your log file:

So it’s basically the same, just no mounted CD-ROM image. Now this is all fun, but what about networking? As I had mentioned before, I bought a VIRL license, which includes a l2 Catalyst image, so why not use that, instad of a ‘traditional’ Linux bridge? Sure! In this example I’m going to connect the 4 ethernet ports from the ESXi into the first 4 ports on the cisco switch, with the last port connecting to a Linux bridge, that I then route to, as I wanted all my lab crap on a seperate network. To start the switch I use this script:

Now as you can see the udp sockets are inverse of eachother, meaning that the ESX listens on 10000 and sends to 127.0.0.1 on port 20000, while the switch listesns on 20000, and sends packets to 10000 for the first ethernet interface pair.

By default VMware only assigns the first NIC into the first virtual switch, so after enabling CDP, we can see we have basic connecitivity:

About neozeed

What is there to tell? I've loved UNIX like things since I was first exposed to QNX in highschool (we had the Unisys ICONS!), and spent the better time of my teenage years trying to get my own UNIX... I should have bought Coherent in retrospect.. Anyways latched onto Linux in 1992, and then got some old BSD admin books and have been hooked on the VAX BSD & other big/ancient things since...!